Innovation simply means coming up with a new idea, method, or product. The trick is to focus your ingenuity in ways that translate into meaningful results for work and life. The key to innovation is to ask the right questions. Just asking the right questions, starts the process. In the book, The Future Belongs to Those Who are Fast, Jim Carroll shares three questions you can use to innovate and drive change.

This is my collection of Seth Godin quotes. They’ll make you think and ponder as you wonder around from one idea to the next. Seth’s sweet spot is marketing but his quotes easily span business, change, greatness, innovation, leadership, mediocrity, and strategy.

Sometimes your best strategy is to do the opposite. Doing the opposite can be a great way to differentiate (aka a “differentiation strategy.”)

A Superior Product is Built from Its Constraints, Not Its Features.

“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” – Peter Drucker

One of the best ways to deal with change is to anticipate it. At the beginning of each year, I take a step back to see the forest for the trees.

Here are 3 simple thinking techniques I tend to use each day. There are some more advanced thinking techniques, but here I’m boiling down to a set of 3 you can use today. In fact, you can even use them while you read this post.

What are the key stages in an innovation life cycle? What is the end-to-end value chain for bringing innovation to market? In “Smart Spenders, the Global Innovation 1000,” an article in strategy+business magazine, Barry Jaruzelski, Kevin Dehoff, and Rakesh Bordia write about the four key stages of innovation that the 94 high-leverage innovators have in common.

What is your business?  What will it be?  What should it be?   These are powerful questions to ask.
In The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management, Peter F. Drucker writes about asking what your business is, will be, and should be to avoid spending your energy defending yesterday and instead, spend your energy exploiting today and the future.
Key Take Aways Here are my key take aways:

Ask what your business should be.
Systematically abandon what no longer adds value. …

What leads to the downfall of established companies?  In The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management, Peter F. Drucker writes about five bad Entrepreneurial habits that let small companies leapfrog over the big companies.
The Five Bad Entrepreneurial Habits
According to Drucker, the five bad habits are:

NIH (Not Invented Here)
“Cream” a market.
The belief in “quality.”
The illusion of the “premium” price.
Maximize rather than optimize.

The Downfall of Established Companies
Drucker writes how the bad habits let small companies use Entrepreneurial judo:
There are in particular five fairly common …

According to Michael E. Gerber, Innovation, Quantification, and Orchestration are the backbone of every extraordinary business.  They are the essence of your Business Development process.   In The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, Gerber explains how Innovation, Quantification, and Orchestration are key to your business development process.
Key Take AwaysHere’s my key take aways:

Innovation, Quantification and Orchestration are the keys to your business.  Innovation, Quantification and Orchestration are the backbone of business development.
Innovate in how you do things.  Innovate in how your business …

How do you make an idea stick?  Mark Twain noted, "A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on."  Meanwhile, people with important ideas, struggle to make their ideas stick. In Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Chip Heath and Dan Heath write about six principles to make your ideas stick and help you get your point across.
Key Take Aways Here are my key take aways:

Be a master of exclusion.   Less is more.  Ruthlessly prioritize …

“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” — Steve Jobs
Innovation objectives are how you realize the potential for your business.  Innovation is how you can create game changers either in the marketplace, your product, or your processes.
From what I’ve seen, the people that do best with innovation are the ones that can effectively leverage their intuition.  I think the other real key is being able to turn innovation into results, both iteratively and incrementally.
In today’s world, I think another key that might not be as obvious is that …

This post is an index of my book nuggets from Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques (2nd Edition), by Michael Michalko. In this book, the author, a former Disney Imagineer, provides expert creative-thinking techniques for approaching problems in unconventional ways. You can apply the techniques to create original ideas to improve your personal life and business life.
My Nuggets
Here’s my nuggets so far …

Idea Techniques (Group A)
Idea Techniques (Group B)
Idea Techniques (Group C)
Idea Techniques (Intuitive)
Personal Invention Quotas
Storyboarding the Disney Way

How do you create predictable results in your business? Once you’ve figured out that an innovation is useful and you’ve quantified its impact, how do you implement it in your system? You orchestrate it. Orchestration is the elimination of discretion to help produce predictable results. Orchestration is about creating order, standardization, and quality in a predictable way. In The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, Michael E. Gerber writes about Orchestration.’
Key Take Aways Here’s my key take aways:

Orchestration is …

"The measure of choosing well, is, whether a man likes and finds good in what he has chosen." — Charles Lamb
How do you know whether your innovations are working? You need to quantify your results. This is how take a business from good to great. You experiment, you innovate, and you measure your results. You carry forward what works and you throw out what doesn’t. If you don’t have the numbers, you’re flying blind.
In The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, …

“Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. The act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.” — Peter F. Drucker
Which innovations can amplify your impact or save you time or create more value? Innovations in your approach. It’s one thing to try to innovate in your products. It’s another to innovate your process. Innovating in your process can unleash your capability, create more value, reduce costs, … etc. To get in the right mindset, you have to think of your business as a product. It doesn’t matter …

Can setting a quota, help you accomplish more? It worked for Thomas Edison. In Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques (2nd Edition), Michael Michalko writes about how Edison used quotas to improve his results.
Thomas Edison’s Personal Invention Quotas
Michalko writes:
“Thomas Edison held 1,093 patents. He was a great believer in exercising his mind and the minds of his workers and felt that without a quota he probably wouldn’t have achieved very much. His personal invention quote was a minor invention every ten days and a major invention every six months. To …

Storyboarding is a brainstorming technique where you stick pictures on a wall to frame out stories. In the book, Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques (2nd Edition), Michael Michalko writes about how Walt Disney originally came up with the idea of storyboarding to see at a glance how far along a project was.
What Is Storyboarding
Michalko writes:
“Storyboarding can be likened to taking your thoughts and the thoughts of others and making them visible by spreading them on a wall as you work on your problems.”
The Story of Storyboarding
Michalko writes:
“Walt Disney came …